On the psycho-emotional deficitisation of workers in the age of cognitive enhancement

Abstract

Despite being the subject of public and scholarly debates for some time, the topic of cognitive enhancement remains theoretically under-developed in organisation studies. This is because the ‘dots’ still have to be ‘connected’ between macro-level phenomena (here, the therapeutic ethos and cognitive capitalism), and micro-level phenomena (in this case, cognitive abilities). In this essay, we use Fromm’s notion of social character to theorise dialectally about the interaction between these macro and micro-level phenomena. Doing so enables us to examine how the macro/micro interaction fosters to adoption of cognitive enhancement in the context of work, and what kinds of consequences might emerge from this. We propose the psycho-emotional deficitisation of workers as a central consequence of the aforementioned interaction, and define it as an internalised version of external ideals of what it means to be a productive worker under cognitive capitalism, which over time generates and reinforces the affective experience of being deficient. Our theorising around socially patterned defects of a cognitive kind has crucial ramification for our understanding of technology-mediated affective control at work and how human–technology interactions shape the subjectivities of workers towards greater self-inferiorisation vis-à-vis the perceived superiority of technology. We close by foreshadowing avenues for future research.